Review: Heroes of Mana
Heroes of Mana offers an engaging experience for RTS fans, but Mana fans beware, this isn’t your typical Mana game. Sure, there are cute blobby bunny-esque creatures to kill by the dozens, but you don’t get the immediate action you come to expect from the Mana series. The title is a very slow moving RTS that genre fans will enjoy, and others might ignore. Which is a shame, because the action gets really enjoyable once you get past the annoying tutorial.
The adventure begins aboard the airship Nightswan, plunked down in the middle of hostile territory. The hero Roget, a soldier of Pedda and his crew are sent to the land to of Ferolia to stop the Beastmen of the land from initiating a war between the realms. He soon realized that they were sent on a mission by his superiors to eliminate the whole crew.
Players are then pitted against adversaries after the lengthy exposition. The game is nearly controlled entirely by the stylus, which works well most of the time. I kept feeling that there was too much graphic interface on the screen that got in the way of the action. Gradually the mechanics of the game is introduced at a pace that even novices will understand how to manipulate their units, and harvest elements from the land to build structures to produce more units.
Once you harvest various resources, you can build structures within your airship to build an army and deploy them to the field. This was an excellent design choice, because it clears the land of vulnerable buildings, by housing them within a fortress-like airship that can be transported to various anchors around the stage.
The graphics are cheery, and similar to previous Mana games, but the whole game is awash in pastoral muted tones that look like they came out of an aged picture book. The popup profiles of the characters are well-drawn and quite beautiful, and the characters are very well animated. Each character is joyously animated despite the the limited pixel count of each of the sprites.
While the graphic interface was a tad overwhelming at first, it gradually grew on me. I was able to command the units very efficiently, and the ability to swap screens at any time was a welcome feature to quick scroll a mini-map or dig deeper into the menu system.
Heroes of Mana is not for the impatient, but with time, it became very rewarding. For a handheld system that has a huge library of games, there are few RTSs. So I would recommend this to anyone who is looking for a solid portable RTS. While newcomers to the genre might want to pass and start with a PC RTS instead to get their feet wet.
Toots
Posted to Hot Stuff, Video Games on 27 September 2007
· Comments (1)
Other stuff like this: ds lite, heroes of mana, nintendo ds, rts, square enix
Thanks for the review Toots! I have this game but have not cracked it open yet. I look forward to checking it out.